Hot on the heels of reducing pricing on a range of Phenom II and Athlon II chips a couple of weeks' ago, AMD yesterday rolled in a new CPU into its high-end consumer line-up.

As the fastest consumer chip sold by the firm, the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, launched in August 2009, can now be purchased for around £140, including VAT. Look a little further into the details and you'll notice that the chip operates with a toasty TDP of 140W.

The new chip is also the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, but differs from its namesake by being based on the latest C3 silicon revision that reduces the TDP to 125W. This is in keeping with the rest of the high-speed Phenom II X4 range, thus bringing a greater number of supporting motherboards into the frame.

The guts of the AM3-supporting processor stay the same, of course, meaning that it operates at 3.4GHz, backed up by 2MB of L2 cache and a 6MB pool of shared L3 cache.

Apart from the headline-grabbing reduction in TDP, the new revision also brings other benefits such as support for four DIMMs running at 1,333MHz and better power-state regulation.

We expect etailers to phase out the C2-revision model in favour of this one, and should the price stay the same, the 'new' 965 BE's overall proposition becomes a touch healthier.

Intel's Core i5 750 is the obvious competitor to the revamped AMD chip. Is a reduction in TDP and a bunch of minor improvements enough to tip you in AMD's direction? Let us know in the HEXUS.community forums.